Before the arrival of the 24-second shot clock in 1954 turned pro basketball into a fast-paced game, many a victory came from clever passing and ball-handling in the backcourt that set up good shots.

The Boston Celtics’ Bob Cousy and Bill Sharman formed the best-known backcourt tandem in the N.B.A.’s first decade. But rivaling them were guards Bobby Wanzer and Bob Davies, former Seton Hall players who helped propel the Rochester Royals to the 1951 N.B.A. championship, the only league title in the history of that much-traveled franchise.

Wanzer, who was inducted in 1987 into the Basketball Hall of Fame at Springfield, Mass., where Davies, Cousy and Sharman were already honorees, died on Saturday at his home in Pittsford, N.Y., near Rochester. He was 94.

His family announced his death.

“Davies and Bobby Wanzer were deadly shooters, drivers and feeders in backcourt,” the New York Times sportswriter Leonard Koppett wrote in his N.B.A. history “24 Seconds to Shoot” (1968), recounting an era when “a six-two guard was considered tall, six-four a freak.”

The Minneapolis Lakers had their own slick guard in Slater Martin but looked most famously to George Mikan, the N.B.A.’s first dominant center, in winning several championships. But the Royals beat them in a semifinal playoff series in 1951 and went on to defeat the Knicks in a seven-game league championship final.

Back then, the Royals played their home games at the 4,000-seat Edgerton Park Arena, a world apart from the 17,300-seat Sleep Train Arena, which houses their modern-day franchise successors, the Sacramento Kings. As the Royals’ founder and coach Les Harrison once recalled, “the N.B.A. was so small and operated on such a short shoestring that we won the title in Rochester and the league couldn’t afford a championship trophy.”

But that Royals team, led by Wanzer, at 6 feet, and Davies, 6-foot-1, along with the future Hall of Fame center Arnie Risen, 6-foot-9, had talent enough for those modest home-court turnouts.

Playing nine seasons in the N.B.A., all with the Royals, Wanzer appeared in five consecutive All-Star Games, from 1952 to 1956, and he was named to the second-team all-league squad in three straight seasons, from 1952 to 1954.

“We were an exceptional team passing the basketball,” Wanzer told The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in 2003. “We played tough man-to-man defense, we were a smart team that knew how to control the ball before the 24-second clock, and we made our free throws.”

Wanzer had an outstanding two-handed set shot and he sometimes penetrated for a hook shot, finishing in the league’s top 10 in field-goal percentage four times.

He set a league record for free-throw percentage, at 90.4 percent, in the 1951-52 season. He averaged 12.2 points a game for his career, playing mostly in a relatively low-scoring era.

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Bobby Wanzer in 1953.

He was a player-coach for the Royals in Rochester and also coached them after they moved to Cincinnati.

More than half a century after his Royals won the N.B.A. championship, Wanzer was rooting for Sacramento to bring the reinvented franchise a second league title. “We’re a long way removed,” he said of his old Royals team, “but still part of the franchise’s tradition and history.”

Robert Francis Wanzer was born in Brooklyn on June 4, 1921. He played for New York City championship teams at Benjamin Franklin High School in Harlem in 1940 and ’41, then went to Seton Hall, in South Orange, N.J.

After leaving Seton Hall to serve in the Marines during World War II, Wanzer returned in 1946, when Davies, already with the Royals, who were playing in the old National Basketball League, moonlighted as the Seton Hall coach on a team that went 24-3.

Wanzer joined the Royals in 1948, their first year in the N.B.A., which was known then as the Basketball Association of America. When the Royals won the 1951 championship, they had three guards from Seton Hall — Davies, along with Wanzer and his college teammate Pep Saul. City College’s Red Holzman, the future Knicks Hall of Fame coach, also played in that Royals backcourt.

Wanzer was named the Royals’ player-coach in 1955. He coached the team in Rochester during his last two seasons as a player, then was solely a bench coach when the team moved to Cincinnati in 1957. He was replaced early in the 1958-59 season with a coaching record of 98-136.

The team later changed its name to the Kings and played in Kansas City and Omaha before moving to Sacramento.

Wanzer became the first men’s basketball coach at St. John Fisher College of Pittsford in 1962. He coached there for 24 seasons and was also the athletic director.

Wanzer is survived by his daughters, Mary and Beth Wanzer; his son, Bobby; a sister, Marilyn Ulrich; five grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. His wife, Nina, died in 2005.

With the Rochester Royals having long gone the way of other small-city N.B.A. teams like the Syracuse Nationals and the Fort Wayne Pistons, Wanzer gained particular satisfaction when he was voted into the Hall of Fame.

It was “recognition by my peers,” he told Neil D. Isaacs in his oral history, “Vintage N.B.A.” (1996), “especially after being buried in a small town throughout my career away from the media centers.”

Wanzer reflected as well on how the 24-second shot clock “took away the virtues of ball control” but said that he remained a fan. “I still follow it, college and pro. It makes no difference. It’s basketball.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D8 of the New York edition with the headline: Bobby Wanzer, 94, Hall of Fame Player From N.B.A.’s Early, Patient Days, Dies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe